We have the go ahead for this project. Our BES is at 4.0.5a, and the GW client on the BES is at 6.5.7 and will remain so. All of the MTAs, POAs (47) and desktop clients are going to 7 this week. We have been advised by RIM that we should disable BB services during the POA upgrades to prevent db corruption and/or user issues - does anyone have any experience or comments with this?

I would expect that the upgrade would be fine, and that the GWConnector may need to be bumped to ensure all is well as you do when a user moves POA. Any advice would be appreciated - the GW Admin is very unhappy because he can't plan the phased rollout of upgrades without determining the impact on our BB users.

The BES will just fail out for the users who's POs are down. And it should connect again after it comes back up. If you want to kick start it you can restart the BlackBerry Controller but you shouldn't have to.

Worst case scenario is mail delays for all BlackBerry users because the BES is busy timing out.

Thanks again - we have argued successfully for these upgrades to take place out of hours to reduce impact to users both at desktop and bb level, and to reduce impact on BES should services need to be restarted.

Update - we tested upgrading POA with BES services running, and initially it looked OK, but the Controlller service had to be restarted as it stopped responding. Eventually we did the POAs in blocks, taking the BES down completely during the upgrade and then restarting all services after the upgrade was complete.